by Craig Welch
Cops had followed Yoshi for years, but every time they got close, he managed to slip away. He regularly bragged to colleagues about outsmarting investigators. When an agent heard Yoshi would attend the May bug fair, the tip worked its way to Special Agent Ed Newcomer.
Newcomer had become a wildlife cop in his thirties, later than most. He had been an assistant attorney general for the state of Washington where he prosecuted disciplinary cases against doctors, nurses, and veterinarians. He had turned down an offer to work for the FBI in order to join the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Newcomer considered the wildlife service an elite posting, one that offered more range and freedom. The FBI fielded nearly thirteen thousand agents, but Fish and Wildlife employed only about two hundred and investigated wildlife crimes all over the country.
Newcomer had dreamed of working undercover. He believed he could blend in almost anywhere. For that he credited mandatory busing. Inner-city kids had been shipped to his suburban Denver junior high. In high school, the middle-class Newcomer was bused into the city. He grew up a minority among kids of diverse backgrounds. Though wiry and unintimidating, he carried himself with confidence. He had studied martial arts since the age of twelve.
He worked under a wildlife cop who had made her name chasing alligator poachers in the 1970s. She believed in giving agents rope. Even with less than a year on the job, Newcomer believed in using it.
To catch Yoshi, Newcomer needed a fake identity. “You can’t be judgmental, you can’t be afraid,” Newcomer once said of undercover work. “You have to open up your soul in a way. You have to buy in to the philosophy and attitude of those you’re after.” That would be simpler if he were also pretending he was someone else. Newcomer knew from his training that he could not map his new character too precisely. Better to merely draw in rough contours. Better to keep things vague and close to the truth. It made deception easier to manage.
Newcomer benefited from the advice of sage colleagues such as Sam Jojola, who had been the former deputy resident agent in charge of Fish and Wildlife in Los Angeles. He kept a plastic tub beneath his desk filled with fake business cards and driver’s licenses, remnants of Jojola’s life undercover: a Santa Barbara real estate broker, a supervisor at a development company in Reno, an owner-operator of East Bay Antiques, a sales rep for a photocopy-and fax-machine company, an Indian trader for authentic southwestern jewelry.
Jojola once chose an identity as a phone repairman because his ex-wife worked for the telephone company. Knowing the job, the pay, and the benefits helped him infiltrate a group of marksmen illegally plugging trophy animals on the Southern Ute Indian Reservation near Mesa Verde in Colorado. Jojola spent three years on hunting excursions with no backup, no radio, and no tape recorder, tracking well-armed suspects. He sauntered off at night and scribbled license numbers or the day’s highlights in a notebook stashed in his fatigues. One suspicious hunter, an off-duty policeman, even ran a check on Jojola’s vehicle plates. Luckily, Jojola had licensed the car in his fake name. The hunters grilled him in the middle of the night about his identity. In town, they checked on him unexpectedly. They left after seeing his van littered with phone-company paraphernalia—key chains, coffee mugs, T-shirts.
Another operative usually adopted grumbling tough-guy personas. He wanted to be able to hang around with bad guys without having to engage in too much conversation. His fake identities gave him an excuse to rarely speak. He grew his hair long, used foul language, and scattered issues of Playboy and Penthouse around his truck. He called it “establishing my reputation as an asshole.”
Newcomer knew he would need a name close to his own, one he would answer to if someone called it without warning. He also wanted a surname that started out like his own so that he could fudge a signature if he accidentally started signing his real name. This character would need to be vaguely well educated and free to come and go as he pleased. Newcomer knew enough about fishing to know the boating world included jobs few people understood. So Newcomer got a haircut and a new name. He became a middle-class suburban guy who sold boating supplies, a boring job that left time for exciting new hobbies. Like bug collecting. Newcomer called this fellow Ted Nelson.
Newcomer as Nelson had come to the Los Angeles museum that day without a plan. He went in and looked around for Yoshi. Seeing him, Newcomer decided to wing it. He strolled up to Yoshi’s booth and started firing off questions, a curious guy considering bug collecting. Convincing Yoshi of his sincerity was easy because Newcomer’s interest, and ignorance, was real. He hadn’t had time to study up on butterflies, though he would do so plenty in the coming months. Newcomer could see that Yoshi liked the attention. He pointed out insects and quoted prices, the two men laughing and nodding. At the end of the day, Yoshi gave Ted Nelson a gift, a box of mounted butterflies to start his collection.
Within weeks the pair became mentor and protégé. Over coffee at Starbucks on Venice Boulevard, Yoshi talked about the time Mexican customs agents caught him with two hundred live beetles and the time a South American official saw a beetle’s horn poking out of his carry-on. Yoshi told Nelson he sold antiques through Sotheby’s and had once collected fighting fish. He said that he had run a travel business and had passports in different names—one Japanese, one American.
Yoshi explained the extremes to which bug collectors went for their obsession. True insect lovers didn’t just catch butterflies but also gathered larvae, pupae, chrysalises, and cocoons. They grew special plants in their homes and reared their own butterfly specimens. The finest collectors did not want butterflies that had ever flown; flying could scratch the delicate, papery wings. True collectors used caterpillars to produce new specimens before their eyes. The moment butterflies emerged and their wings filled with blood, collectors slipped the fresh specimens in glassine envelopes and refrigerated them. The dying insects would metabolize their fat to keep warm, and once the butterflies were dead, the collectors could stick them with pins and mount them under glass in display cases.
Newcomer filed away each tidbit, not knowing what might prove useful later. He told Yoshi that he reminded him of Indiana Jones. The balding bug collector appreciated the comparison. Yoshi confided that he wanted to take his business in a new direction. He wanted to sell butterflies on eBay but feared his written English was too poor: “I can do so many things, but I could not use eBay,” he said, chuckling. But if Yoshi supplied insects, Ted Nelson could write descriptions. The two new acquaintances could become business partners.
Newcomer suspected his new friend wanted someone he could feed to the cops if he got caught. Ted Nelson, of course, agreed to help. From the beginning Yoshi made clear his business wasn’t always legal. Yoshi warned Nelson to avoid customers demanding proper documentation. If federal agents contacted him, Nelson was to say his boss kept all paperwork in Japan.
Butterfly trading is controlled by the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, an agreement among more than 170 countries. CITES was designed to keep the plant and animal trade from overexploiting rare creatures, and it protects thirty thousand plants and animals using three categories, reflecting the varying levels of scarcity and risk posed by commerce. CITES III species generally thrive despite trade, but purchases are regulated and require export permits just in case. CITES II species do not yet face extinction but could, so nations limit exports to stabilize populations. These species are carefully controlled, like prescription drugs. Buying or selling CITES II species isn’t illegal unless done without permits. CITES I species, except in rare circumstances, are vanishing so rapidly that commercial trade is outlawed. Getting these species was Yoshi’s specialty.
Newcomer went on bug-trading Web sites and found that buyers posted thoughts about one another. It seemed like a good way to ingratiate himself to Yoshi. Ted Nelson would post a message vouching for the butterfly man and start taking requests for online orders. Newcomer thought Yoshi would appreciate the initiative.
Yoshi instead excoriated his pa
rtner. Ted Nelson didn’t know what he was doing. Ted Nelson had moved too quickly. Ted Nelson did not properly screen his customers. Ted Nelson was rash. If the feds raided Ted Nelson’s home, they’d find Yoshi’s name on his computer. Ted Nelson was going to get them both caught!
Newcomer had overplayed his hand. After a while Yoshi returned to Japan. The men stayed in touch, but the relationship grew distant. Yoshi was gone, and the agent had not witnessed a single illegal transaction. Newcomer decided to have Ted Nelson sell his own butterflies on eBay, advertised with digital pictures Yoshi had given him. At the opening of each auction, Newcomer would assign other federal agents to post the highest bid. Newcomer held dozens of online auctions, hoping to illicit a response from Yoshi.
He didn’t expect the reaction he got.
Yoshi once again was livid. Ted Nelson was now competition, and Yoshi started campaigning against him. Whenever Ted Nelson posted a butterfly for sale, Yoshi posted the same species on another Web site. Sometimes Yoshi added a jab. “Shame on you Ted Nelson,” he wrote once. “You’re using my photos without permission. You don’t have CITES for this.” Yoshi advertised his goods as cheaper “than eBay auction and Ted Nelson.”
Newcomer’s aggressive tactics weren’t working. More than a year after their first meeting, Newcomer had actually turned Yoshi against him. One day Newcomer took a call from the California Department of Fish and Game in San Diego. A Japanese man ranting about butterfly smugglers—one smuggler in particular—had left a recorded message on the agency’s tip line. Yoshi, calling anonymously, had turned Ted Nelson in.
A long line of men and women have gone to similar lengths trying to catch people committing wildlife crimes.
Before the creation of the CIA, the DEA, or even the FBI, some of the country’s sneakiest covert work involved wildlife smugglers. Agent Phillip Farnham of the Bureau of Biological Survey went undercover during the Great Depression to round up fur importers smuggling silver foxes from Canada. In Chicago, federal agent John Perry transformed himself into a drunken hobo named Dopey who wore stained trousers, scuffed boots, and natty sweaters. He tracked bird thieves who illegally supplied street vendors on the city’s waterfront. Smugglers paid Dopey to ferry packages among vendors, recognizing their error when Perry strolled into court in his dress uniform. Another agent in the 1930s worked undercover as a drummer in a swing band and caught duck bootleggers who hid contraband in nightclub iceboxes. In the 1960s, a covert agent code-named Peanut Man dispensed nuts in bars and restaurants in Texas and Louisiana as a ruse to spy on bird traffickers. He arrested so many on one outing that the government took them to jail in a school bus.
In the years before World War I, even the crime-busting Pinkerton Detective Agency’s private eyes went after animal bandits. According to Louis S. Warren’s The Hunter’s Game, two years before the creation of the FBI a Pinkerton known only as Operative 89S lived incognito for more than a year with a gang of bird poachers while he hunted the thugs who had killed a Pennsylvania game warden.
Newcomer knew his case was in trouble, but he insisted on salvaging something. He asked another agent to pose as a collector and purchase butterflies from Yoshi online. In a moment of weakness the careful dealer let down his guard and sold this stranger three Bhutan Glory butterflies, without permits. A package of butterflies arrived from Yoshi. They were smuggled, misdeclared, and lacking proper paperwork. The agents had finally caught Yoshi committing crimes.
But the crimes were a joke, and Newcomer knew it. Rather than a conspiracy to smuggle thousands of imperiled animals, the agent, after more than a year’s work, had caught the butterfly kingpin trafficking $137 worth of insects. It was like nailing Pablo Escobar for snorting a line of coke. No U.S. attorney would touch a case so small. Worse, Yoshi had stopped returning Ted Nelson’s e-mails or posting on Web sites. Newcomer ran several more eBay auctions, but the butterfly king didn’t surface again.
Newcomer had torpedoed his own case. The agent figured he’d never see Yoshi again.
The Yoshi files sat untouched on Newcomer’s desk for two years while another case ballooned around them. A band of Los Angeles birders were breeding roller pigeons, birds with a bizarre genetic tick that makes them spin backward and plummet to earth in midflight before righting themselves. The birds’ acrobatics were a spectator sport, with breeders judging flocks of twenty, called kits, based on the quality and synchronization of their rolls. Unfortunately for the pigeons, the tumbling drew predators that thought they were weak or injured. Breeders responded by killing the predators. They trapped and stomped on Cooper’s hawks. They suffocated red-tailed hawks with sprays of bleach and ammonia and gunned down peregrine falcons with air rifles or shotguns equipped with silencers. One birder claimed that he killed forty each year. Another filled a five-gallon bucket with talons. The breeders as a whole were killing two thousand birds of prey a year, species protected by the Migratory Bird Treaty Act. And peregrine falcons, already hammered by pesticides, had only recently staged a comeback.
Newcomer resurrected Ted Nelson, this time as a struggling, not-so-smart blue-collar guy. The new Ted Nelson was down-and-out. He wore ratty jeans and kept his hair thick and grimy. A fat biker mustache curled around his chin. He worked for a boat builder and drove a crappy van. He had so little money, he told people, that his boss let him live in the company warehouse.
Nelson infiltrated competitions in which birders traveled house to house, from the San Gabriel Valley to downtown Compton. Sometimes he wore a wire; sometimes he shot video from a tiny hidden camera. He met a man who built and sold hawk traps in a parking lot behind a store that sold pigeon paraphernalia. Leaning against a backyard porch was a .20-caliber pump-action air rifle. “Five pumps of this,” the owner told Newcomer, “hawk’s gone.”
A few weeks into his new operation, Newcomer got another tip. Yoshi was back and headed to the bug fair after skipping the last two events. Newcomer decided to engineer a run-in. Ted Nelson could apologize and clear the air. Newcomer had to play his role perfectly. He stood at the far end of the museum and filmed Yoshi from a distance with a zoom lens. He watched Yoshi move from table to table in his flower-print shirt, dark slacks, and tennis shoes, chatting up fellow bug lovers. When Yoshi walked toward a narrow hallway, Newcomer saw his chance and headed the same way.
“What are you doing here?” Newcomer said.
“No, what are you doing here?” Yoshi replied.
The men shook hands and said hello. Nelson said he was glad to see Yoshi. He had, in fact, been meaning to thank him. Ted Nelson explained that someone had called in an anonymous tip about him selling butterflies illegally. Not knowing what to do, he had fallen back on advice from Yoshi: When the cops showed up, Nelson didn’t let them search his place. He had also kept his best stuff elsewhere. Yoshi’s wisdom had kept him out of prison, and Nelson said he was eternally grateful.
Newcomer saw that Yoshi believed him. The two men agreed to meet for lunch that afternoon. Two hours later over cold soup and cabbage at a Korean barbecue, Newcomer asked about Yoshi’s health. Yoshi commented on Ted Nelson’s new biker mustache. It almost seemed like the butterfly man was flirting. Both confessed they were still deep into the bug trade. Newcomer had his hidden audio recorder running.
“You ever get these chimaeras?” Newcomer asked. With wing-spans that rival those of small robins, the South Pacific Ornithoptera chimaera flutter above rain forest canopies feeding on the nectar of high-sprouting flowers.
“Chimaeras? I think I have about ten pair,” Yoshi said.
“What do you want for those?” Newcomer asked.
Yoshi was silent. “Chimaeras come from Papua New Guinea,” he said. “You can get them from Indonesia easy. But in Papua New Guinea…difficult. I give them to you for…seventy dollars or eighty,” Yoshi said finally, and then laughed.
Yoshi ordered greasy beef and pork dishes for them both. Newcomer, a strict vegetarian, forced it down.
“I might ask you to sell m
e those chimaeras,” Newcomer said after a time. “This would be for me. And then I’ll resell them to someone else.”
Yoshi said he could send them by mail.
“What about customs?” Newcomer asked. “Will they check it?”
“Express Mail, no check.”
Newcomer asked if the chimaeras would have permits.
“No permits.” Then Yoshi corrected himself. The butterflies would have permits; they just wouldn’t be real.
Newcomer agreed to buy all ten pairs.
Yoshi loosened more. He volunteered to get Ornithoptera alexandrae, the world’s largest butterfly. It was the Holy Grail for collectors. With the wingspan of a football and exquisite, iridescent yellow-blue-green ring patterns, the Queen Alexandra’s birdwing is one of nature’s most endangered and spectacular creatures, found in the rain forests of Papua New Guinea. Alexandras are banned from all trade, but Yoshi said he regularly shipped them from Papua New Guinea to Europe and then on to Japan and the United States, covering his tracks by mislabeling the packages. “We write down that it’s a moth,” Yoshi said. Customs officials “don’t know better.”
Queen Alexandra’s birdwing, Ornithoptera alexandrae
Newcomer’s chest pounded. Maybe he hadn’t blown this after all. “I wonder if any of my customers would buy an Alexandra?” he said, as if to himself.
“You be careful,” Yoshi warned. “You may lead them back to me.”
Newcomer backed off, but Yoshi told him to bring the next day a list of species that he wanted.
After lunch, Yoshi asked if Nelson could give him a lift to a Japanese sauna. In the car, Yoshi talked casually about other butterflies from faraway lands, which he also said he could find ways to bring in. He also spoke openly of the men who frequented this sauna, men who sometimes propositioned one another in front of him. “That right?” Newcomer said, again trying to sound disinterested. He let the moment pass but made a mental note. Men visited this sauna looking for sex. The revelation implied an escalating bond of trust. After three years of trying to put Yoshi away, Newcomer was suddenly making quick progress.